Nellie Taft

Carl Sferrazza Anthony

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061865947
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito storico

On the morning of William Howard Taft's inauguration, Nellie Taft publicly expressed that theirs would be a joint presidency by shattering precedent and demanding that she ride alongside her husband down Pennsylvania Avenue, a tradition previously held for the outgoing president. In an era before Eleanor Roosevelt, this progressive First Lady was an advocate for higher education and partial suffrage for women, and initiated legislation to improve working conditions for federal employees. She smoked, drank, and gambled without regard to societal judgment, and she freely broke racial and class boundaries.

Drawing from previously unpublished diaries, a lifetime of love letters between Will and Nellie, and detailed family correspondence and recollections, critically acclaimed presidential family historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony develops a riveting portrait of Nellie Taft as one of the strongest links in the series of women -- from Abigail Adams to Hillary Rodham Clinton -- often critically declared "copresidents."

One

First Lady of the Land (1861–1878)

Nothing in my life reaches the climax of human bliss I felt when, as a girl of sixteen, I was entertained at the White House.

—HELEN “NELLIE” HERRON TAFT

To write about one’s childhood,” Nellie Taft cautiously stated in her memoirs, “is not easy.” First she explained she didn’t have any memories that were “sufficiently ‘early’ to have any special value.” Then, when she admitted to having a “score” of childhood stories, she decided that they were “hardly worth relating.” In what she attempted to pass off as self-deprecation, her reason for keeping her childhood to herself was that it was “quite commonplace.”

A superficial glance at her early years would suggest privilege and comfort. It was deceiving. In fact, it was so “not easy” for her to turn back that she kept her childhood to herself. It was in those early years that all the conflicting emotions, ambitions, insecurities, and self-definitions that characterized her as a public figure were set. As always, it began with her parents.

Her father was a brilliant lawyer who could probably have been elected President had his wife “allowed” him to pursue a path to that office as his best friend and a college friend both successfully did. After John had completed the folly of one term as a state senator, Harriet Herron would not relent in her opposition to his taking any further public service posts until five of their six daughters were married off. John’s later stint as a U.S. district attorney lasted only four years. Otherwise, his life was spent working to support the vision she had for herself and her daughters as being part of the Cincinnati upper class. Nothing was more important to John Herron than keeping Harriet Herron happy, and nothing was more important to her than keeping up appearances—despite the anxiety it created over their financial stability. Yet even when she was living the life she thought was best, Harriet would complain. The day after Christmas one year, she wrote that “John is spending it at his office where most of his holidays are spent, engaged in the usual problem of making ends meet at the close of the year.”¹

John was born on May 10, 1827, in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. His great-grandfather, Francis Herron, had emigrated from County Wexford, Ireland, ninety-seven years earlier, settling in the Pequa Valley, so any trace of a brogue had long faded from the family. John’s father, Francis, died when he was fourteen, but the son dutifully made frequent visits from Ohio to his mother, the former Jane Wills, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, until her death in 1877.²

Attending Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became president of the Theta Pi fraternity, John befriended Benjamin Harrison (as President of the United States, it was Harrison who would name Herron to the only appointed public office he held, that of district attorney). A loyal alumnus, he would serve as chairman of the university’s board of trustees for fifty years, cultivate potential faculty to build its prestige, and preside over its founding-day celebration. That a woman’s gymnasium was later named for him was ironic in light of his belief that “women should never sweat; they might perspire a little bit, become a trifle moist, but never sweat.” Of all his daughters it would be Nellie who consistently defied such old-fashioned notions and eventually did so in such dramatic fashion as to seem to be proving a point to him about women’s capabilities.³

After reading for the law, Herron leased office space in Cincinnati and opened a sole practice. Unable to afford the rent alone, on January 8, 1850, he took in another young attorney with whom he began a lifelong bond. It was a friendship that would prove decisive in shaping the direction of Nellie’s ambitions. Herron was a man “of good habits, education, and mind—a good fellow, by accounts and by appearance,” according to the diary of his new friend, Rutherford B. Hayes. The duo helped found Cincinnati’s Literary Society, and when “Ruddy” was dating Lucy Webb, he even had her stand a “cross-examination” by Herron, who had guessed correctly that they were engaged. “I am inclined to think he is in the same interesting predicament,” Hayes surmised, regarding John’s lady friend Harriet Collins.⁴

John and Harriet married on March 7, 1854, in the Cleveland home of her brother, William Collins. Lawyer, banker, and later director of the Lake Shore Railroad and East Cleveland Railroad, Willie had come to Ohio to pursue business opportunities a year before with Harriet, their brother Isaac, and widowed mother Maria Clinton. They had migrated from the family seat of Lowville in western New York where, as descendants of the town’s founders, they had been the recognized social leaders. Harriet had been born there on September 15, 1833, when her father, Elijah, was forty-seven years old.

The great-great-grandson of a Bramford, England, immigrant, Elijah Collins had been a Democratic congressman from New York’s twentieth district, a seat his son Willie later held, both serving one term each (1823–25 and 1847–49, respectively), long enough to earn the title of “honorable.” While Willie would become a Republican when that party ran its first presidential candidate (1856), Isaac remained a Democrat, even serving as a delegate to the convention that nominated Samuel Tilden, who ran against Hayes. A Yale graduate, he later became a judge.

Elijah’s death had left the family in genteel poverty. In an era when a girl’s status was defined by her father’s prestige, it was especially hard for fifteen-year-old Harriet. She soon found refuge in heraldry. Her maternal grandfather, Isaac Clinton, was a Revolutionary War hero and minister. Through her grandmother Charity Welles, however, Harriet boasted an astonishing ancestry of Saxon, Celtic, Nordic, Gallic, Roman, and even biblical kings, saints, and nobility, documented in medieval church records and ancient castle guides. Cincinnati elite might whisper about how Harriet strained to keep up, but she always had her blueblood. Nellie found her mother’s ancestor worship ridiculous. Only late in life could she be coaxed into joining a heraldic group by a cousin who was lonely for company.⁵

The newlywed Herrons first lived on Longworth Street in the city, but by the time Nellie was a year old, they were boarding in the East Walnut Hill house run by the Walt Whitmore family—“a beautiful place,” John thought. The Civil War was raging, and the city came under martial law when the Confederate Army approached southern Ohio after taking nearby Lexington and Frankfort, Kentucky. Nellie remembered none of the war. Shortly after another move to Fourth and Broadway, the Herrons settled permanently on Pike Street. Her earliest memory was of sitting on the steps there, watching Union soldiers marching home from the war in a parade celebrating the peace when she was four years old.⁶

Harriet would give birth to eleven children. Helen Louise was the third of the eight children who survived. Born two months after the firing on Fort Sumter, on June 2, 1861, she was always called “Nellie.” Eldest child, Emily, born in 1856, was showered with attention by her parents, and Nellie, seeming to resent this, remained distant from her. It was Jane—“Jennie”—born in 1858, whom Nellie turned to as an older sister and confidante. Two more girls, one born before and the other after Nellie, died in infancy. What effect this had on her can only be surmised, but the death of these two sisters left an age difference of three years between Nellie and the next oldest and next youngest, further reinforcing her easily ignored standing of—as she called it—“number three” and feeling alone in a family large even by Victorian standards. Eventually it seemed to forge a tighter bond between her and the next child, Maria, born in 1864.

Weeks after Maria’s birth, Harriet was again pregnant and later that year bore William, the first of two sons. The second, John “Jack,” came in 1870 after the death of yet another baby daughter. Finally, there was the patient Eleanor, Nellie’s junior by thirteen years, and the beloved “littlest sister,” Lucy (named after Hayes’s wife), an astounding eighteen years younger. It was from Jennie, Maria, and Eleanor that Nellie found her greatest support. Despite the children’s age span of twenty-three years, there were always at least six other siblings in the house throughout Nellie’s years at home.⁷

Nellie would affectionately recall Harriet’s “exceedingly keen wit and a mind alert to the humor in every situation” in the household, and especially recalled how she “made her family circle a very amusing and interesting one in which to grow up.” That Harriet maintained her “stimulating personality” in light of her enormous responsibilities of motherhood was all the more remarkable to her daughter. Without nursemaids or nannies, Harriet raised her brood. “So many children to nurse,” Nellie recalled, “to scold, to sew for and, sometimes, to cook for—in a word, to bring up on a small income.”

If Harriet embraced the traditional role of motherhood, however, she held John responsible for not just the family’s well-being but the lifestyle that she expected for them. Remarkably, within two short years John Herron had gone from sleeping on a hard mattress in a corner of the small offices he had shared with Hayes to being named junior partner at King & Anderson. Eventually, he would be lead attorney at Herron, Gatch & Herron, in practice with his son Will. Regardless of how prestigious his standing in the legal community, though, John never made enough money to keep Harriet happy.

Whether it was to avoid her querulous demands or the fact that he was genuinely trying to drum up more business, John always seemed to be at the office—weekends, evenings, and holidays. There was no evidence of marital discord, and the long range of their parenthood certainly attested to a physical intimacy between them. Lonely for his company, Harriet was frequently depressed while her determination to keep up appearances on an uncertain income left her anxious. Silently observing her mother through large brown eyes, Nellie would never voice her disapproval of the role of a woman as exemplified by Harriet, but at some early point in her life she determined to diverge from it.

John Herron remarked that he spent money on his family in the winter and went into debt by the summer. He rented a fashionable cottage on the eastern seaboard or rooms in the cool mountain resorts for his wife and children, although he usually stayed in the city to work. He would hire servants when Harriet wanted to entertain. His sons would receive Yale and Harvard educations, and his daughters were presented to Cincinnati society as debutantes in expensive and beautiful gowns. Still, he was willing to go into debt to keep his family circulating among and behaving like the elite set. The power of perception overtook reality for Harriet. Her sensitivity to suggestions that meeting their financial obligations was anything but effortless was evident even with the family. A wealthy aunt offered to pay half of Lucy’s expenses if she accompanied her to Paris, Eleanor reported to Nellie, “although she knew how proud Mama is.” Regardless of the relief it would have provided the Herrons, while giving their daughter a social season in the City of Lights, Eleanor continued, “Of course, Mama wouldn’t let her do that, but Papa seems willing.”

Nellie fully absorbed the contradictory messages about money, status, and appearance that her parents unwittingly instilled throughout her early life. Outside the Herron home Nellie was supposed to enjoy all the comforts and privileges of the wealthy class as a natural part of her entitlement. Inside the house, however, the monetary and emotional sacrifices were obvious: the ever-absent father trying to keep a step ahead of the debt, the toll on her mother’s otherwise lighthearted nature, the stress on the young daughters to keep abreast of the latest whim of the fashionables. Nellie was expected to behave coolly, even grandly, in the arena of great wealth, yet she carried within her heart a sense of guilt about driving her father further into debt and having to work that much harder. The overall effect of this was to breed a repressed nervousness in Nellie’s very core. For many a decade it would seem that she rarely experienced genuine relaxation.

Being an anxious debutante in summer silks offered greater hope for a different life than did the dull reality of middle-class tedium in the winter. Arctic blasts of wind coming off the nearby river left snowdrifts banked against the three-story Herron house. The structure was utterly indistinguishable from the rows of houses that flanked it, its somber interiors augured by the exterior’s grim gray brick and the sad little yard before it, surrounded by black iron fencing and gate. Even when Nellie was inside the house visualizing she was elsewhere, she couldn’t escape the intrusion of reality. Her life in the gray house, she later recalled, was “marred by an impression of the clatter and clang” of harnessed workhorses pulling heavy wagons from the river landing up the steep, cobblestone hill, at the bottom of which sat the Herron home. It is no surprise then that her “pleasantest associations” of Cincinnati were in the “striking and imposing” Anderson and Sinton mansions across Pike Street at the top of the hill.

Despite the presence of his ten sons, Larz Anderson’s redbrick house always seemed to have “an air of great dignity,” but to Nellie the Sinton mansion was the greater of the two. The white colonial mansion had columns, a manicured greensward, and clipped topiary, and she considered it “one of the most beautiful residences” in the United States. In 1873, when she was twelve, Nellie took an interest in the details of Annie Sinton’s wedding to Charley Taft, making him an instant millionaire by inheritance. As an adolescent she would be among the many girls invited to come for an informal luncheon several hours before one of Annie Taft’s famous evening parties. Becoming familiar with the layout of the mansion, as some of the older girls carried their gowns upstairs to dress, she must also have drawn comparisons with her own home. Nellie never plainly or confidentially stated what she really thought of Annie, but a certain degree of envy would be easily understood.

If Harriet’s efforts to integrate her daughters among the young misses and maidens of Cincinnati’s upper class was the motivation for enrolling Nellie and her sisters at the most fashionable girl’s school in town, she was also providing them with an extraordinarily in-depth education. In a large, old Victorian house on Seventh Street, Edith Nourse of Maine set out to “develop high qualities of character” in her female students. Called “the nursery,” the Miss Nourse School for Girls counted the city’s daughters of privilege in its roster. Nellie may have been “number three” at home, but when she entered the Nourse school at five years old, she was but one of one hundred. And anonymity at school proved a godsend for the introverted Nellie.

Losing herself in reading and writing, learning numbers and arithmetic, she became an excellent and enthusiastic student, while her skills at drawing left much to be desired. Enrolled in the “primary department” until she was ten years old, Nellie also had weekly lessons in history, mythology, and (to provide “powers of observation and stimulating their curiosity”) elemental science. It was when the map was pulled down for geography lessons that her first interest in exploring life beyond Cincinnati was stirred, but a more definitive desire was inspired in her by teacher George Schneider, who came to instruct Nourse students from the Cincinnati Music School. As Nellie proudly recalled many years later, “Music was the absorbing interest of my life in those days, the inspiration of all my dreams and ambitions.”

Nellie may have relished the solitude of the city’s Mercantile Library, where she studied, or doing calisthenics in the school’s “perfectly private playground,” but once John Herron bought a piano and hired an instructor to give her vocal and instrumental lessons, his daughter spent all her free time at home banging out her scales so loudly that the entire neighborhood could hear her. Such indulgence—the sort of obvious symbol of wealth that Harriet tended to pursue—spoke not only of her father’s respect for Nellie but the level of her passion for music.

While she studied music, however, Nellie continued on an academic course. In the “high department” for girls older than eleven, she took English literature, two branches of natural sciences, and—after excelling in French—German, Latin, and Greek. All of it was intended to make “fit” the graduating young lady of eighteen “for the Harvard Examinations, the Cincinnati University or any college open to women.”⁸

There were few outlets available to an upper-middle-class American girl of the late 1870s that would permit her to stand above and beyond her peers. For a young woman with Nellie’s interests those possibilities included further education, advancing her study of music into a profession, publishing poetry or novels, leadership in social reform, or earning a salary as a teacher, perhaps a nurse. Convention had it, however, that she find comfort and security as a wife. That there was no example, no compromise, no tradition of perhaps achieving recognition while also being a wife would be the conflict that sent her into emotional turmoil over the next few years.

In looking at her parents’ marriage, Nellie had clear evidence that a wife could negatively influence the direction of her husband’s career. When Ruddy Hayes had been governor, he had offered Herron a superior court judgeship to fill a vacancy left by Alphonso Taft. John responded that he had to “go for money and leave glory to others.” The only glory he took was directorship of Longview Hospital, a state mental institution.

Knowing how much John longed to serve on the bench, Hayes offered him another judgeship before he left his governorship. To this John Herron responded poignantly: “I wish I could accept it. I may never have such another chance…. should like the labor…. It would benefit me. Like other things when I want them, I can’t get them—and when I can get them, I can’t take them. At present I don’...